The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  “Anything gone wrong?” he asked normally.

  She shook her head as if he had asked about the weather. “Just that brother of mine.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  “I wish I knew. It’s the sea.”

  “You don’t mean he’s been trying to go to sea?”

  “He would try anything with the sea.” She danced and shivered and shook the cold from her face. “After the last few days he’ll feel like it.”

  “Why?”

  “The extra depression, following on visitors.”

  He thought for a little and asked, “Does he get depressed?”

  “Perhaps it’s not a good word. There’s nothing left in him.”

  “After visitors, his mind is drained grey as that rock.”

  The continued casualness of his words must have been like a gift to her, for she glanced at him with a quick smile and nodded.

  “Why do you invite them then?”

  “I must do something. There is always the hope that he may be taken out of himself.”

  “And you’re always wrong. Tell me this: what did you really mean by mentioning the sea?”

  “It’s the last element,” she said lightly, and glanced at his thoughtful expression as he now stared before him. “He goes more and more to the sea. He catches all the fish. He has lines and nets.”

  “You mean——” He hesitated.

  “It’s the way he’s going,” she said.

  He did not look at her. It was tragic, but for a strange moment, beyond this woman, in another light, he thought: It’s a good clean way. And for the first time he got an austere vision of Donald, of the final element in the man, and it touched him deeply and fatefully. He could not speak.

  “Colonel Mackintosh—I like him,” she said. “And that man, Mr Blair. There’s an ordinariness, a normal way of living and working—I thought if only——” She went stuttering and hurrying on but he had nothing to say. Even the warm personal impact she had made upon him passed away.

  Presently he began to speak quietly. “I was in the first big war. I remember what it felt like when you come home and find that you have no real contacts, you have been shifted outside them, you are outside and cannot get in—and—perhaps—in your silence, for you cannot speak, cannot tell—don’t want to get in, want to stay out, to go away and wander—where the ghosts are—remembering those you knew . . . . That was common.” There was no emphasis on any of his words, no warmth; his memories seemed automatic.

  “How did you get on?” she asked.

  “Work. I started working. Gradually new human contacts were made and the memories went farther and farther away.”

  “Donald has no work.”

  “Oh yes, there’s always plenty of work,” he answered, as if that were not the trouble. Then he turned his face to her. “Does he—do you—believe that that girl up there, Anna Cameron, has his child?”

  The lightness, the impersonal manner, fell from her. She squeezed the cold out of her hands. She looked startled and frightened. “They say so.”

  He remained silent but his face hardened.

  “Do you?” she challenged him.

  “Yes.”

  “You think he should marry her?” she cried a trifle wildly, broken by his quiet sternness.

  He took his time. “Would you be against it?”

  “Why should I? Why should you think that?”

  “I am only asking you.” But his voice now was gentler.

  “I would not be against anything that was for his good. Surely you believe that!”

  “I do.” But he could not add anything more though he was aware she was struggling against an obscure accusation.

  “Do you think it would be for his good?” Her face was white and challenging.

  His silence seemed to torture her so that she cried, “Why don’t you say what you think?”

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” he replied in a quiet almost downcast voice.

  “You know it wouldn’t!” There was a sharp triumph in the bitter voice and this affected him somehow to a deeper silence, and he became aware that in some mysterious way he had been brought still nearer to Donald, to that plane where all words were a distraction and without real meaning.

  “He is not ready for it yet,” he said. The words “probably he never will be” formed in his mind but it was as if he could not be bothered speaking them aloud.

  “You know there is nothing I would not do for him. Nothing!”

  And he knew it was true, but he also knew, in the case of what they had been discussing, that it was true as a last resource. But, one step farther on, a last resource would always be too late. She knew this also. He decided he had better say something. “I had a long talk with your brother one night. I think I know a little about how he feels.” He paused.

  “Did he mention her? What did he say?”

  He looked at her, for it was astonishing to him that she could even imagine they had discussed so personal a matter. Instantly he apprehended a profound distinction between man and woman. She moved restlessly and her face flashed away. “No, we didn’t talk about that. About other things,” he answered. “But I should say that he simply has no interest whatever in Anna or the child. Just none. That’s the trouble. And even if he tried to get an interest it wouldn’t come. He knows he would be of no use to them. Not that he tries to justify himself in that way. If he did, there would be no final difficulty.”

  “I know!” she cried. “That’s just it! And he won’t go away. What can I do?”

  And now it was almost as if there was hope in the woman’s voice, certainly the craving for hope in a new line of action, some other bright way out of the awful despair.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and added, reflectively, “I’ll think it over.”

  Her gratitude touched him. He had liked her from the very beginning and now he told her of the torch which he had dropped when they were together in the Monster Cove and which he had found again in Andie’s hoard. She became enthralled with interest, as if their talk had lifted her into the happiest state of expectancy, and asked if he thought Andie might have buried the crock of gold in the cave.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “He may have more than one hiding place and the cave might strike a deep memory.”

  When he left her, he became consciously aware of the smell of the sea and its tossed tangle, looked back and saw the white-smothered waves and the thrown spume. As these were shut off, the freshness of the earth came upon him, out of the long-parched ground, and the colour, the wet vivid green. The wind flattened and combed the irrepressible grass, the drenched wild flowers, and the rain was a driving mist against the dark-brown mountains. All at once he saw old Fachie by the sheltered gable of his house, his left arm outstretched and his dog rushing low to the earth to round up a cow or stirk that had got into the young corn. There were no other figures to be seen and in a moment the little drama with the old bent figure might have been of any Age back to Neolithic times. When he had watched it to a conclusion and was going on again, words dropped into his released mind. He had quoted them more than once from the Preface to Frazer’s Golden Bough: “Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition the testimony of ancient books on the subject of early religion is worth very little.” “And,” as he himself had often added, “not only of early religion.”

  He smiled, aware of still carrying the remarkable quietude, which had so strangely come upon him by the boathouse. He won’t go away she had said. Nothing was keeping him, of course. He would want to see people less and less . . . no one . . . until the sea got him. He stood for a little while, quite unaware that he had stopped, in a curious mindless wonder, then went on to the cottage.

  Chapter Thirty

  As he entered at the door, Mrs Cameron came to help him out of his wet oilskin, to hang it up to dry in the right place. “Wait you,” she said when she saw his hands at his face, “and Anna will get you a towel.” As he was turnin
g to the stairs, protesting, Anna came with a towel and he began rubbing his beard vigorously. He refused to do anything about his feet and legs, and now he was in the kitchen, assured that they had just been on the verge of making themselves a cup. “I don’t think I would swap a teapot for any bottle yet invented.” His back to the fire, he was stretching himself, warming his hands. “And what does Sheena think of this weather? Not much! Eh?”

  But Sheena was shy, and Anna took the blind hand that reached towards her while the eyes remained on this mysterious stranger.

  “Sheena, is it?” said Mrs Cameron, lifting the peats under the kettle until the flames flew up. “I have given her such bad lear that when she is tired of her own stories she will be at me for mine. Indeed she was wondering if you had any stories yourself!”

  “Me! What stories could an old bachelor have to tell a little girl like Sheena?”

  Sheena had now put one hand to her mouth and was looking up from under her brows as he continued to smile to her.

  “If I may say so, it’s not but that you have plenty of time left to learn.”

  He glanced at the old lady and laughed. “You think I might come at it yet?”

  “Indeed I sincerely hope so.”

  This banter delighted him and he confessed that the only stories he knew had to do with old cairns and ruins, and they weren’t real stories at all but a dry-as-dust which learned men made up for themselves, great rigmaroles in books. Sheena just wouldn’t bother her head with them.

  But apparently he was wrong, for Sheena, it seemed, had a consuming interest in archaeology, and particularly in that esoteric aspect of it which concerned the Man in the Stone. This had touched her much more closely even than the Man in the Moon, and she still remained unsatisfied despite the ingenious efforts at elucidation by both her great-grandmother and her mother.

  When Grant was seated, with his cup of tea beside him, and Sheena at last almost by his knee, he was suddenly overcome by an extraordinary access of uncertainty, if not of shyness, for it was a literal fact that he had never told a story to a child. He now groped for a rag of that confidence with which he had addressed learned societies. “The truth is,” he said, in a flash of inspiration, “the story about the Man in the Stone isn’t finished yet. But when it is, I’ll tell it all to yourself.”

  “Now!” said her granny. “Won’t that be fine?”

  But the small grave face lifted and asked, “Where is he?”

  “Where is he?” repeated Grant, and when the cue didn’t come from the void he added mysteriously, “Ah!”

  As this deception was beneath consideration, a small thumb poked at his knee, and then the grave face regarded him again in silence.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “It’s so long a story that—that it begins with a dog.”

  At once a living interest dawned in the small face.

  “It was a wonderful dog,” said Simon Grant. “Indeed it was the first real dog that ever there was here. Before then, they were all wild dogs, wolves, and they wandered in the mountains and the woods, and they lived by killing beasts, and when they were very hungry they would kill men, too, and women, and even little children.”

  “Was that long ago?”

  “Yes, long, long ago, thousands of years ago. It was even before they put up the standing stones over there or made the cairn. And the people then they hadn’t knives like our knives: they had only sharp stones. And they hadn’t sheep, and they hadn’t cattle, and they hadn’t horses. What do you think of that?”

  “What had they?”

  “They had just their stone knives and their stone axes and their bows and arrows, and with them they went off hunting the deer. They were great hunters and could run as fast as fast could be. Well, one day there was a man and he had no food, and he had his mother and his granny and a little girl living with him, and he had to go off and find food for them.”

  “Were they living here?”

  “Yes, but not in this house, because this house wasn’t built then. At that time the people would be living mostly in the caves by the sea. Anyway, one fine day off went the man from whatever house he had here then to see if he could catch a deer, and when he was away up behind in the mountains, going through a lonely glen, what should lump out on him but a great wolf with long white teeth. But if the wolf jumped out on him, he soon jumped to one side, and when the wolf jumped at him again, he swung his stone axe to hit the wolf, but he didn’t hit him properly that time. So the wolf came at him again, and it was a terrible fight they had, the man and the wolf. But the man had one thing, which the wolf hadn’t got and that was his stone axe, and with his stone axe he at last killed the wolf and so won the fight. But now the man was very tired, and when he went over to sit down—what should he see lying before him but a deer! For the wolf had just killed the deer. And now the man had a deer. Wasn’t that lucky for him? And that wasn’t everything, for now comes the strangest thing of all. For you wouldn’t believe what the man saw next. Do you know what it was? It was a little puppy wolf!”

  “What was it like?”

  “Well, it was just like a puppy. For a wolf is only a wild dog. Do you understand?”

  “Was it like old Fachie’s puppy?”

  “Exactly! The very one! So there it lay, where the old wolf had left it, in a nest of wild grass. And when the man saw it, he understood why the old wolf had fought so hard, because she had fought to save the puppy’s life. So suddenly he thought he would take the poor puppy home with him. But when he came to lift it, it was not so easy.”

  “How that?”

  “How did he lift it? Like this.” And Grant lifted Sheena onto his knee.

  But before Sheena could become self-conscious Mrs Cameron said, “That’s as good a story as I have listened to and I hope you will go on with it.” He replied equally seriously that he would be happy to continue; and Sheena, not too pleased about these outside interruptions, pulled very slightly at the top button of his jacket. And so she learned how the puppy growled when robbers came one night and thus warned the man in good time, and learned moreover how the puppy grew up, and went off one day with the man, and pulled down a deer which the man had wounded with an arrow, and many other interesting and astonishing things.

  When at last he found himself in his own room he could not sit down, much less attend to his long neglected correspondence. I have let myself in for it now! he thought, for he had promised to relate how primitive man tamed the horse and the cow and learned to grow crops, all on the lands of Clachar.

  But he could not conceal from himself that he had enjoyed it. He had not dreamed he was so inventive. O lord, if the Colonel and Blair had overheard him! Sheer softening of the brain! With Blair rising to the comment, “You’ve found your true métier at last!” He shook with mirth. But at the same time his intelligence was suggesting seriously that it might be better to deal with the pig next because, after all, he had heard about the three little piggies that went to market. Was Sheena too old for the accompanying traditional action directed towards her toes? When his mirth found itself suspended in solemn questioning, it mounted in a higher wave than ever and drowned him completely. As he lay in his chair and lifted his heels, a last shred of sense tried to clack them noiselessly.

  At fifty-two a man was no doubt growing senile, was reverting to his childhood. And a little child shall lead them . . . . Suddenly he saw Sheena, as he had seen her the other day, playing at “making a housie” by the peat stack. Her utter absorption (for she had not seen him) had kept him quite still. Only a creator, like an artist, was ever absorbed in the same way. Now he had a profound intuition of the meaning of what he had seen, of the self at once being lost in, and being part of, the very act of creation. He saw that that was precisely what the absorption meant. Whenever he had moved and Sheena had seen him, her self-consciousness—and his own—had destroyed creation. And a little child shall lead them. My God! he thought, feeling Sheena still on his knee, against his breast, under
his chin.

  After supper, the rain moderated into occasional showers, the wind into squalls. He grew more restless as the hours passed. The whole place had become a complex in which he was meshed and caught. After all, he was an archaeologist. His business was to find the crock of gold and detail its contents with scientific precision, not get entangled in human affairs. And even if his experience did in some measure deepen his understanding of his subject, still archaeology was an exact, and exacting, job of practical work. It was for poets to follow the gleam of the crock to the tune of the Silver Bough; their peculiar minds ran that way. That an idiot should have stolen the real crock from him was an ironic judgement on him. He would go to bed, have a good sleep, and get going early in the morning. It was early in the morning that the practical Arthur had seen Foolish Andie.

  From his bedroom window he looked on the world. The light was fading. The house was very quiet. Suddenly he was afraid to turn round. So he forced his head over his shoulder. There was nothing on the mat, no one. With beating heart and quickening breath, he went to the small room and pulled the door open. Everything was motionless including the narrow box on the floor with the skeletons. Probably the wind had made a small noise on the roof, though he hadn’t consciously heard a noise. He had the distinct feeling of a presence, something moving in the air about him. He closed the door without touching the box and went back to the window, but found he was facing the room.

  He was definitely disturbed, far more so than he had ever been in a dream of the figures. For he had experienced no feeling of supernatural fear in the dream. He had been absorbed in watching them and only when the woman had turned round and seen him had something of inexplicable awareness drawn the air to such a tension between them that he had awakened. But it had been a tension of awareness, of inexplicable recognition, rather than of fear.